'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Thursday, June 14, 2018

India has 53,000 manual scavengers spread across 12 states; a four-fold rise from the last official count (data from 121 out of over 600 districts)

AN INTER-MINISTERIAL
task force has counted up to 53,236 people involved in manual scavenging in
India, a four-fold rise from the 13,000-odd such workers accounted for in
official records until 2017. While the numbers are
an improvement from before, when a majority of states denied the existence of
the practice, it is still a gross underestimate as it includes data from only
121 of the more than 600 districts in the country.

More importantly, it
does not include those involved in cleaning sewers and septic tanks, and data
from the Railways, which is the largest employer of manual scavengers. Of the
53,000 identified so far through the national survey, only a total of 6,650
have been confirmed officially by states in keeping with the tendency to
under-report the prevalence of this practice.

The task force is
expected to submit its final tally on the National Survey of Manual Scavengers
by the end of this month.The survey was to be undertaken in 170 districts of 18
states where the maximum number of “insanitary latrines” were demolished and
converted into “sanitary latrines”. However, according to official records,
only 121 districts in 12 states have been covered — Bihar, J&K, Jharkhand,
Karnataka, Telangana and West Bengal are yet to participate in the survey.

“Of the 12 states that
cooperated with us for the survey, there was reluctance when it came to
verifying the numbers identified by us,” a task force member said.

The maximum number of
manual scavengers — 28,796 — have been registered in UP. States such as
Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, which had earlier
reported zero or about 100, have now upped their count. Moreover, much of
urban India has not been included. This is because while data on insanitary to
sanitary toilet conversion has been made available for rural areas, the
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, which is in charge of Swachh Bharat
(Urban), has informed the Social Justice Ministry that such “data for is not
maintained separately.”